Ultrabook and notebook - what are the differences?

"Ultrabooks" - what are the differences to conventional notebooks in this relatively new product category? We will explain it to you here.

The ultrabook model: MacBook Air

With the MacBook Air, Apple created a new product category: light and thin laptops that are only equipped with the bare essentials and are therefore even easier to transport. To counter this, the chip manufacturer Intel introduced the term "Ultrabook" and linked it to special requirements that computer manufacturers such as Dell, Asus or Samsung have to meet with their new models in order to be able to certify their devices as "Ultrabooks". These special specifications make the difference to normal laptops.

The external differences: display, design and interfaces compared to the notebook

• Design: Intel wants to establish extremely portable, compact and high-quality laptops with the Ultrabooks. This results in the design requirements: The approximately 13-inch display normally sits in a high-quality and lightweight housing made of aluminum (e.g. Dell XPS 14), magnesium alloys (Toshiba Kira-101), combinations of these materials or even carbon like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1. The housing must also be kept very flat and compact in order to keep the device portable. The limits set by Intel are very narrow here, for example a 13-inch device should never be over two centimeters thick. With conventional laptops, the manufacturers have much more leeway, here the housings can be made of less high-quality materials and also be thicker, larger and heavier.
• Display: Normal laptops rely on display diagonals up to 17 inches. In contrast, ultrabooks tend to have small screens around 13 inches, but they often score with a high resolution and are correspondingly sharper (e.g. Samsung Ativ Book 9). Since higher-quality components are usually installed in "Ultrabooks", the displays are also brighter, have larger viewing angles and are sometimes even protected behind Gorilla Glass (Dell XPS 14).
• Interfaces: The limited space in the compact housing of the Ultrabooks affects the number of interfaces. Most ultrabooks do without a DVD drive and only bring the bare essentials: Two USB 3.0 ports, an Ethernet port, an HDMI and headphone output and an SD card reader are standard. You will rarely find a VGA or display port output, not to mention more exotic outputs such as SATA. Here, the notebooks score with a greater variety of connections. Both note and ultrabooks both offer WiFi, of course; In contrast to notebooks, Bluetooth is always available with Ultrabooks. UMTS with SIM card is rather the exception for both.

Processors, graphics chips and storage space: differences in the inner values

• Processors: All Ultrabooks share the same series of processors: Intel's "ULV" series ("Ultra-Low-Voltage") was specially designed for this device category and is characterized by a particularly low power consumption. At the same time, they are not as powerful as conventional processors in notebooks. These usually have higher clock speeds or more processor cores (e.g. quad-core instead of dual-core).
• Graphics: Most regular notebooks use a dedicated graphics card, e.g. from the GeForce series from NVIDIA or AMD Radeon models. With the exception of exceptions (e.g. Dell XPS 14 or Asus Zenbook UX302), no proper graphics card is installed in "Ultrabooks". Graphics tasks are carried out by a so-called on-board graphics chip: this is integrated into the processor, takes up less space and Electricity, but is also much less powerful than a regular graphics card. Demanding games and graphics applications quickly push these chips to their limits.
• Storage: Most ultrabooks use SSD hard drives to promote speed and portability. These compact flash memories are up to three times faster than conventional hard drives. Intel also specifies that ultrabooks must wake up from standby in two seconds. At the same time, they don't offer as much storage space (only 128 to 512GB). Correspondingly, larger standard hard drives with a lot of storage space are built into larger notebooks, which serve more as a tower PC replacement, on which you can, for example, also store complete film or music collections that you hardly need to take with you on the Ultrabook.
• Battery: Ultrabooks are designed as mobile working devices, the battery life must be correspondingly long. The economical processor and the SSD hard drive help here: Top models manage a good 8 hours of battery operation, the average for Ultrabooks is approx. 4 hours, varying according to workload, which is, however, considerably longer than with conventional notebooks. In addition, the new Haswell processor generation is even more economical and enables even longer runtimes. In large, strong gaming laptops, on the other hand, the battery is just enough to carry the device from the living room to the study.

Enormous price differences between notebooks and ultrabooks

• Normal notebooks have a much broader price range than ultrabooks. You can find affordable entry-level models starting at 200 euros, but you can also spend well over 3, 000 euros for an upgraded gamer or business notebook.
• The price for ultrabooks is relatively clearly limited: you will rarely find anything below around 700 euros, the prices have leveled off for most models between 1000 euros and 1100 euros. But even above 2000 euros you can still find models, which then know how to convince with perfect full equipment and elegant design.
• Before buying, it is best to inform yourself at CHIP Online about recommended notebooks as well as the test winners in the Ultrabook area. You will find all top lists clearly arranged on this page.

Conclusion: are you an Ultrabook type?

Would you like to take your laptop with you to the university, on a business trip or on vacation? This is where the Ultrabooks show their strengths in terms of battery life and speed. If your laptop is rather on the desk and is even used for performance-hungry tasks such as gaming or 3D software, then "classic" notebooks cannot be beat in terms of selection, performance and price.